Category: business

As I write this, I’m thinking about leading two upcoming discussions on how to move into product management leadership. I’ve promoted dozens of people into senior management roles, and I’ve been thinking about what made them standout as potential managers, and what made them successful. The good news is that being a great product manager trains you already with so many of the skills to move into a management role – being the face of the team, working with many groups, influencing to get the job done etc. So, what does it take to standout from a bunch of standouts? I want to share some interesting patterns of behavior that we implicitly look for when we have those closed room discussions with HR about who’s going to get that precious manager role. I’m going to assume all the basics are already in place: right tenure, consistent high performer, track record of delivery. If you’ve got all that, then there are some intangible ingredients that I want to shed some light on:

Communicating like you’re already a manager. Often, being a great product manager means that you can communicate really clearly to your teams, and to your customers. This is table stakes. You have to be able to break down a vision into a clear roadmap, and then into workable chunks, and then into specific user stories. Product managers have this down – they know how to communicate what they want their teams to build. They’re also great at talking to customers – listening well, asking great questions, translating what they hear into needs. But being a people manager, and working with other senior leaders, entails taking all those skills and creating a different picture. Often PMs go into a ton of detail, they want to explain the work they’ve done, after all it was a ton of effort. But leaders don’t want to hear those – they want someone who can connect the business goals to the work being done in a way that makes sense. To be promotable, you have to be able to do this – it’s not a skill that execs are patient to see you grow into. If you can’t succinctly explain what you do and why it’s important for the business, you can’t get the right resources for your teams, and you can’t succeed. So spend less time explaining all the details, and more about telling a story, and connecting the dots.

Working the strategy Say/Do. This shows up as how you make decisions, and how much time you spend talking strategy and actually backing up what you do with the bigger picture in mind. Product managers are expected to understand the big picture – it should reflect in their roadmaps and customer documents. But how much do you actually follow this? Someone who has “leader” written all over them is the person who asks great questions about prioritization based on strategy. Who constantly starts backlog meetings (yes, backlog!) with the bigger picture in mind. It’s not just a question of knowing the company strategy & goals, it’s how you bring them to life in the way that you work every-day. Knowing that the person you’re about to promote already “gets it” goes a long way in setting them up for a manager role.

Feedback loops. People who are going to be good managers ask for feedback. A lot. They ask after meetings, they follow-up with senior leaders, they make a point of understanding how they show up. And then they take that feedback, try something new, and then ask for more feedback. You’d be surprised how little people do this. They wait passively for 1-1’s or monthly meetings – or even, worse, their annual performance reviews. When you can see someone is actively understanding how they show up, and are genuinely interested in improving themselves – you know that they will help others do the same – which is what you want in a people manager.

Do you still want to be a manager? Are you doing these things? We want to hear – write to us and share your stories of promotion, or trying to get promoted.

We see this picture of PM in the middle of UX, Tech and Business a lot:

From Mind The Product (https://www.mindtheproduct.com/2011/10/what-exactly-is-a-product-manager/)

We use this graphic as well – it’s been a nice, introductory way to speak at a high-level about the product management function, and it highlights the importance of partnering with these three important peer functions. Product management works with business leaders/marketing teams, engineering teams and UX teams. They sit in the middle often translating from one to the other. But we’ve found this picture hasn’t been sufficient to talk about what the actual day-day job of a product manager should be. When you introduce a graphic that describes the function as this small overlap of a venn diagram – it discounts the sheer amount of work and knowledge that’s required to actually do the job.

So, we came up with a new graphic:

This may not be the best drawn diagram, but we want to introduce it as a better way to talk about how a product manager should approach their job. We think this is far more representative of the actual work that we all do on a year-round basis.

The outer circle goes to business. The product manager has to start with a broad and deep understanding and translating company vision, strategy and business objectives. These are the guardrails of our thinking – and we always need to go back to making sure that the decisions and tradeoffs we make are the right call for the business, industry and environment that we work in. We’ve seen lots of features go into products that customers ignore because they don’t make sense with what the business and the customer is trying to achieve.

The next inner circle is technology. This goes beyond partnering with the engineering or development team. The product manager doesn’t (often) code, but they (should) understand what the technology can/cannot do, understand the technical architecture and be able to ask the right questions, and have an engaged and knowledgeable discussion about alternatives. Without getting deep into the technology, the product manager is at the mercy of whatever technical recommendation is made. We’ve seen far too many product leaders and teams fail because they didn’t ask the right technical questions, because they weren’t prepared and didn’t dig deep enough. Technology is a core part of the job – better get used to getting into the details.

The core of the job is customer. Every part of the job is customer-driven. Whether that’s considering the product roadmap (what’s important to the customer), writing user stories (customer needs), doing customer research (talking to customers) – we could go on and on. Every single piece of work that’s produced is with the customer at heart. The product manager represents the customer at the table – they advocate for the customer, deeply understand their needs and ultimately make product decisions with the customer first, with the optimal technology and meeting business objectives.

When you look at product management this way – we believe you get a sense of how the pieces fit together and a better understanding of the expectations of the job. This isn’t a job for sissies!

Let us know what you think! We’d love to get your comments here, or send an email to vidya@productrebels.com and tell us how you see the PM job.